Midnight at the End of a Decade
by TheShadowArchitect
Summary: The 2010s were truly the decade that made MacGyver, or rather, the decade he, literally and figuratively, built himself out of. A series of vignettes tracing Mac's experience of New Year's Eve from 2010 to 2020.
1. Chapter 1

Mac didn't realize it was 2010 until 1:03AM.

Nineteen years old, he sat in an overly-warm dorm room. There was a box fan in the window, blowing cold outdoor air in through the bulk of a heavily duct-taped computer tower. The air that came out the other side was probably close to 100F. Mac himself sat in a t-shirt and gym shorts on the room's industrial grey carpet, coaxing the most computing power he could out of the formerly non-functional, fifteen-year-old Dell he'd bought at a yard sale for $50. "C'mon," he hissed, its hulking beige cathode-ray monitor seconds away from bathing the room in a disappointing blue glow.

It wasn't until it finally failed that Mac let himself rock backwards and look at the phone he'd thrown on the bed four hours previously.

[1:03 AM, (2) missed texts] the tiny front screen announced. Mac flipped it open, discovering both had been from Harry, an hour ago, one wishing him a Happy New Year and the other a grainy clipart picture of a firework. He smiled, realizing that his grandfather would have had stay up until 3AM in order to text him Happy New Year at the correct hour. Mac felt guilty at the thoughtfulness, and his lack of response.

A month ago, during finals week, he'd told Harry that he hadn't been able to come up with the money for a plane ticket home over break. It hadn't quite been the truth. In reality, he'd had the money, even on top of his scholarship. He'd just… not felt like it. Being alone for a month in the dorms sounded like too great of an opportunity to pass up. Just him, some spare parts, a nearly empty campus to wander…

The first two weeks of it had been excellent.

But as time went on, Mac had begun to feel lonely.

His grandfather had called on Christmas day. They'd talked for about a half hour, after which Harry sent him pictures of his tree and the festive meal he was having with an old friend. It had looked cozy, and Mac found himself regretting his decision to stay. For his own Christmas meal, he'd snuck into a holiday potluck at the international dorm with a food storage container. He'd eaten some kind of lukewarm noodle thing alone in his room.

Mac tried to shake off the guilt and decided he needed to cool down a little. He powered down the computer but left the fan running, then grabbed a sweater off his bed and headed out to the lounge. The fall semester door dec caught his eye. There was a block of black sharpie on it where he'd scratched out "Angus" written in his RA's neat handwriting. He'd scrawled "MacGyver" below it, and the entire semester it had looked a little off. He figured he should email her that he wanted "MacGyver" written, but crossing it out again seemed easier than sending the email.

The cinderblock hallway was bright with industrial tube lights, illuminating the patterns on the walls and carpet. The lounge was midway down the hall and dark and Mac didn't turn on the lights.

It smelled like the pizza he'd eaten in it the evening before, but stale and unpleasant now. He looked out of the window, watching the snow fall down over a practice field. He watched a group of three students make their way drunkenly back to the dorm behind his. As they left his field of vision, he looked back down at his phone and texted his grandfather back.

"Happy New Year's, Harry."


	2. Chapter 2

Mac knew exactly when 2010 ticked over into 2011.

He knew because an irate man in a flat-brimmed hat had screamed it in his face.

Basic Training had started on December 26th. On December 31st, an hour after lights out, they'd come back on. Instructors stormed into the barracks.

"GET UP! PT CLOTHES! OUTSIDE! NOW!" They came through, screaming in faces, throwing bedclothes on the floor, violently shaking bedframes and ripping pillows out from under heads. Mac's eyes shot open, his heart beating hard in his chest. Despite the adrenaline coursing through him, even more than the terror of waking up to a screaming man's teeth inches from his nose, he felt a bone-deep exhaustion. Forcing back a groan, he quickly worked a t-shirt and sweater on over his head and hurried outside with the rest of the class.

Less than three minutes later, lined up in alphabetical order, they all stood shivering in a cold, soaked pit of wood chips. Next to him, a young man who barely looked old enough to be out of high school was standing in a t-shirt and already shivering.

"FORWARD LEANING REST!" Mac grudgingly got down into pushup position. Normally, he thought, it wouldn't have been a big deal. But the hour in bed had stiffened him up without actually giving him any rest, and his arms were already shaking the second they took his weight. He willed them not to collapse under him.

Someone, it seemed, or maybe more than one someone, had decided to celebrate New Year's Eve with some contraband liquor. The instructors had caught them. Then, taking the festivities as a criticism on their ability to tire out a class, had gotten everyone up for an impromptu midnight PT session to make sure the recruits were getting what they'd "paid" for. A crack about "what, in our taxes?" crossed Mac's mind, but he didn't want to be the guy that kept everyone out for an extra hour. Or, at least, not the one to get blamed for it.

"IT'S 2300 HOURS NOW!" An instructor shouted, "WHAT DO YOU SAY WE COUNT DOWN THE NEW YEAR TOGETHER?"

A chorus of "YES, SARGENT!" Went up in the crowd. Even in the last 5 days, an hour was hardly the longest they'd worked out. But it was an hour after 5 days of crappy sleep, PT, and classes that were interesting but taught to the lowest common denominator. It felt like hell.

Ten minutes in to the New Year's Ladder, Mac's hands were numb. Water from the wood chips had soaked into the back of his sweater during a set of flutter kicks, and rain had started falling. It would continue to fall into the next morning.

All through that session, and in the days that followed, he wondered what he was doing there. Harry had been in the Army. He'd fought in Vietnam. After a rocky semester at MIT, Mac had thought Harry would be proud of him when he'd announced he had joined the Army. In reality, Harry hadn't said much about it in either direction. Eventually, he even started changing the subject when Mac wanted to talk about it.

He'd moved back to Harry's the summer before he left. He and Bozer had spent some of that season doing odd jobs around the town to save up money. Then Bozer had started film school that fall, and Mac had found himself left with a weird emptiness, not quite not a college student anymore, but in a sort of no man's land before becoming a soldier.

On Christmas, the day before Basic started, Harry had hugged him tighter than he'd ever hugged him before. Mac remembered wanting to pull away the whole time, but didn't. When Harry finally broke the hug, there were tears in his eyes. "It ain't like the movies, bud." He said. "You get through it. And you come home to me, okay?"


	3. Chapter 3

Mac counted down the start of 2012 laying on his cot in the dark tent.

He was a month in Afghanistan, give or take a few days. It had been the slowest month of his life. Slower than the year his mom died. Slower than his first semester at MIT. Slower than Basic Training, even. And he'd thought, in his heart of hearts, that nothing could possibly have been slower than that.

Culture shock could do that.

He was sheltered, in part, from the Afghani culture. It was the base culture he wasn't quite finding himself in.

It took a certain kind of person for EOD, and the men and women he'd trained with were the type he could talk to about electrical engineering and chemistry and biodefense. Their training together had been difficult and demanding, but it was fascinating and taught to people who were interested. The drills were difficult and required creativity and he'd really begun to truly feel he belonged somewhere. That maybe he had, in fact, made the right choice in joining the Army.

But then he'd graduated. Graduated and gotten on a plane and actually showed up on the base in the middle of the desert to do the job he'd trained practically all the last year for, and he'd found himself with a very different group of people. People, like Jack Dalton, who were smart in a very different way than he was. And he was thankful for that, honestly he was. Even just in that first month, Dalton had saved his life more than once. Pulled him out of the scariest situations of his life with a look of disgust, as though Mac were seriously trying his patience at all times, no matter what he did. He respected Dalton for his abilities, but he wasn't someone Mac could see himself being friends with. Virtually none of the people here were.

Mac quickly learned how to talk a big game, how to fit in on the surface and stay (mostly) out of trouble. He'd known it would be difficult. He'd always respected the concept of deployment as what would be one of the most trying times of his life. But he'd thought that difficulty would come in the form of job stress- of the fact that he was literally defusing bombs in a war zone for a living.

That part, it turned out, was the "easy" part. Well, not easy in the traditional sense. But having something to focus on so precisely, with such high stakes, felt almost like recreation in a weird sort of way. It was the social part that was challenging him most acutely. Never being alone. How quickly tempers flared when there was no option to walk away and cool off. How people acted when they were bored or scared or tired and either weren't allowed or didn't know how to work those emotions out in a reasonable or healthy way.

He watched the glowing second hand tick towards midnight. "Five…" He whispered, hearing the snore of one of his bunkmates who had also foregone the festivities. "Four… Three… Two… One." He wasn't sure how perfectly accurate his watch was, but the loud cheers that erupted ten seconds later in a tent a few over told him it wasn't so far off.

In the end, he probably should have gone to the party after all. It might have earned him some cred with the people he shared a tent with. Speaking of which…  
The tent flap flew open, and none other than Jack Dalton stumbled in. "How was the party?" Mac asked. Dalton stopped, squinting in the darkness.

"F'ck off, bomb nerd." Dalton said. He stifled a giggle before falling onto his bunk, his shin or possibly his head hitting one of the posts in what sounded like a painful way, but he didn't seem to notice. Mac instinctively checked that Dalton's face was uncovered. Then, finally, he rolled over on the sweat spot he'd cultivated over the last few hours and fell asleep.


End file.
